Hard Stop (11 page)

“I don’t know where she is, I swear I don’t,” he said, an anxious quaver in his voice. “We sort of split up a while ago. Her idea. But I’m sure she’s okay. I’d know if she wasn’t.”

I moved in even closer. Close enough to see the pores on his cheeks and smell the fear on his breath. I gathered up the front of his pink oxford cloth shirt and half lifted him off the ground.

“What are you going to do to me?” he asked, like he thought he already knew.

I immediately felt like a piece of shit. I let go of his shirt, took a few steps back and inhaled a deep breath, shaking the dopey fury out of my head. I searched my memory for mantras designed to quell anger, but I was still too worked up to think of any.

“It’s not that important,” I said to him.

I pulled a pen out of my jacket pocket and searched around my jeans, eventually coming up with a gas receipt. I walked over and used the Volvo’s hood to write my name and phone number on the back. I handed it to him.

“I apologize,” I said to him. “I still want to find her, but if you don’t want to help me, okay. I don’t know for sure, but I think it would be better for Iku if she opened a channel of communication. Give her my number. She’ll remember me. She can trust me, though she might not believe that.”

Dobson flinched when I stuffed the receipt into his shirt pocket. I left him and went back to Amanda’s pickup. But before a half dozen paces I stopped and turned around. Dobson was still leaning against his Volvo, studying the piece of paper I’d given him.

“Who the hell is Angel?” I asked him.

Dobson looked up from the receipt.

“If you don’t know, who the hell are you?” he said, and then rolled to his right, catching the handle of the Volvo’s door and letting himself in, starting the car and racing off in a cloud of dust, overwhelmed by the moments in life that remind people like him of their own ineffectuality, their brittle love of self.

I
SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY
at Sonny’s beating on leather bags until my legs, wrists and lungs were equally sore. Then I poached myself in the hot tub, which almost put me to sleep. In that somnambulant stupor I was defenseless against visions of Iku Kinjo caught in a fervent embrace with George Donovan, lounging around afterward wrapped in desultory pillow talk.

I felt better after nullifying the hot tub with a long, cold shower. Better than I felt after leaving Robert Dobson.

It was late evening by then. I’d left Eddie’s secret entrance open so he could come and go as he pleased. By now, Amanda was likely home diversifying his diet with hors d’oeuvres selected to accompany her first glass of pinot.

So when Robin and Laura from House Hunters of the Hamptons called me on the cell phone I felt free to join them at a place in Southampton suitable to their social aspirations.

I was met at the door by a guy in a white coat and black bow tie. He was a lot taller than me, but about the same weight. He spoke with an accent, though too quickly for me to make it out. All I heard was something like “the ladies has been waiting you to be here.” I followed him through the noisy roomful of entrenched City people, the ones who got to stay on after the season because they owned the houses they lived in during the summer. Most of them probably knew each other. None of them knew me. Except for Robin and Laura, who made a ridiculous show of standing and waving me over to their table.

“A rare man to get such greeting,” said the maitre d’, pulling out my chair with one hand and fiddling with my place setting with the other.

“Medium,” I said to him. “Medium rare.”

“Don’t let him fool you,” said Robin. “Red meat all the way.”

“Just bring the vodka,” said Laura. “There’s plenty of time for ordering.”

Laura’s wavy head of dark brown hair had been recently cropped and inexplicably combed and glued into jagged stalagmites. I’d known her to be the staid and restrained member of the pair, so it caught me by surprise. Robin was still her loud, brassy blonde self, with a lot more lipstick than self control. Judging by Laura’s stiff posture, despite the hair and a green drink in a platter-sized martini glass, their respective social styles remained stubbornly unresolved.

“So, things are good?” I asked.

“Been worse,” said Laura.

“
Fab
-ulous,” said Robin. “We just closed today on the Garrison place. Ox Pasture, don’t you know. La-di-da.”

“Co-brokers. Discounted commission,” said Laura, looking out across the big low-ceilinged room. Scanning for the next prospect. “Some la-di-da.”

“She’s such a killjoy. It’s in the genes.”

“Scandinavian.”

“Bergman on quaaludes.”

“I’m an ant,” Laura said to me, pointedly. “Robin’s a grasshopper. What can I say.”

“So, you called,” I said, snatching my vodka off the waiter’s tray as he lowered it to the table.

“Somebody asks me for something I put out,” said Robin.

“There’s a straight line deserving attention,” said Laura.

“Can you believe what I have to suffer?” Robin asked me.

“I like your hair,” I said to Laura, stopping them both in their tracks. “The ants are going to heave you out of the anthill.”

“Is he a goof or what?” asked Robin, fumbling for a cigarette, then realizing they were banned. She folded her arms and sank back in her seat.

“Robin’s the one who called you here, but I’m the one who got the goods,” said Laura.

“This is not a competition,” said Robin.

The waiter, who’d discreetly disappeared for a while, reappeared with pad and pen in hand. Both woman looked defensive, caught unprepared.

The waiter covered the moment by reciting specials and making doodles on his order pad. I focused on the vodka. The women kvetched and bickered over the menu until the suspense became nearly unbearable. I saved the waiter’s sanity by ordering a selection of appetizers for the table. That and another round of drinks.

“So you got the goods,” I said as the two of them sipped on single malts served neat in tiny brandy snifters. “I’m all ears.”

Robin jumped in.

“We found the Japanese girl’s rental. Or rather, Laura did.”

“Is she still there?” I asked.

“Don’t know about that. She wasn’t on the lease. We found her through Mr. Dobson, who was. The agent lent me a copy of the file. Out of professional courtesy.”

“And for a free dinner at the Silver Spoon,” said Robin.

“How do you know Iku was there? Or is there?” I asked.

Robin looked at Laura, eager to tell the story but afraid to grab the floor. Laura made a show of looking nonchalantly around the restaurant.

“Oh, just clever detective work, you could say,” she said.

“Clever detective work. She read the file.”

“The
police
file. If that isn’t detective work I don’t know what is.”

“Police file?” I said.

“They had a note in the file that the Town cops paid a call on the place one night. Noise complaint,” said Robin, unable to resist stealing Laura’s thunder. “I think ‘noise complaint’ and ‘group rental’ are the same words in the dictionary.”

“Synonyms,” said Laura.

“Sin’s another story,” said Robin. “Plenty of that, too.”

“The cops usually alert the owners through the rental agent whenever they’re called to a property. This is a big issue around here, you probably know. Lots of people want more control on the groups, which is fine with me. Who needs them?”

“People who want to come to the Hamptons and can’t afford a kazillion dollar rental,” asked Robin.

“So this complaint,” I said, wedging my way back into the conversation, “what was it about?”

Laura shrugged.

“No biggie. Some neighbor said they were blasting their stereo out the window. Cops get there, a woman named Iku Kinjo apologizes and immediately turns off the music. Cops leave. No further complaints. Not exactly an earth-shattering event in the history of law enforcement.”

“Didn’t make the cover of
The New York Times
,” said Robin.

“Maybe page three.”

“Do you have the names of the cops who made the call?” I asked.

They looked at each other, then nodded.

“Sure. It’s right in the report. Don’t remember their names, but it’s in there,” said Laura, pulling a big pink envelope out from somewhere under the table and plopping it down on top. “Address, telephone number, owners’ names, square footage, number of bedrooms, instructions on cleaning the swimming pool, it’s all there.”

“Us agents are thorough,” said Robin.

“We’re anal,” said Laura. “You’d be, too, if you had to deal with these owners. You’d think we were renting out their children.”

“That’d be easier. Kids are an expense. The house in the Hamptons is an asset.”

“You’re so cynical.”

I slid the envelope off the table and onto my lap, and then sat on it.

“You’re both brilliant,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”

That stopped them faster than the comment about Laura’s hair. Robin nodded appreciatively.

“That is the nicest thing I’ve ever heard you say about us, Sam. Shit, it’s the nicest thing I’ve ever heard you say period.”

Laura nodded, too.

“I hate to agree with her, as you know. But it is.”

The waiter came to the rescue again with the appetizers. While he hurriedly spread them around the table I ordered the next course, lecturing everyone on the merits of the selected dishes, entirely contrived for the occasion. The women didn’t object. In fact, they seemed to like it. I toughed my way through the meal, which I tried to pay for,
but Robin had already slipped the waiter her credit card.

After I got out of there I headed to another place partway up North Sea Road, where I could take a look at the envelope. It was one of the last local hangouts that still looked like it did twenty years ago, when a City person would as soon pop in for a drink as stroll naked through Bedford-Stuy. Though compared to the Pequot, it was like sipping at the Ritz.

“Vodka. Ice. Swizzle stick. Nothing else,” I said to the bartender.

“You want a glass with that?”

“No. Bring it in your hands. I’ll suck it out with a straw.”

Ten years ago this might have escalated into something more serious, but we were both older and a lot smarter, and in no way a lot tougher. So he laughed along with the other jean-jacketed, grey-haired, rosacea-encrusted barflies and went to get my drink.

I opened the envelope and slid the contents out on the bar. I stuck a tiny Maglite in my mouth so I could read the papers under the low, neon-tinted light.

On top was the rental agreement signed by Robert Dobson and the owner, John Churchman. The lease was still in effect. Two years, five thousand a month, utilities, pool maintenance, lawn crew and trash pick-up generously included. From what Robin told me, that was considered quite the bargain, with comparable houses going for sixty K or more for the summer season. She speculated that Churchman discounted the rate to secure the full-time, two-year term. A bird in the hand.

Much more interesting was the police report, a grainy Xerox of a filled-out form. As Robin said, a neighbor’s noise complaint led to a visit by two Southampton Town patrolmen, one of whom wrote that the sound levels coming from the Dobson residence were “excessively voluminous.”
An apparent resident, a young woman who identified herself as “Ikoo Kent Jew,” was waiting for them as they came up the front walk. As Robin reported, she immediately complied with the cops’ request to turn down the music, and that was that.

The cop who made out the report remarked on Iku’s willingness to cooperate, despite “The young woman’s obvious state of advanced intoxication as the result of unidentified substances.”

I took a sip of the easily identified substance in front of me on the bar and leafed through the rest of the file. Then I asked the bartender for a pen and wrote down the address of the place on a cocktail napkin.

“What’s ’at?” he asked, when I gave him back his pen. “Writin’ down a poem?”

“Yeah. An ode to drunken Japanese girls.”

“That’d be a haiku,” said the guy sitting next to me. “Japanese don’t go in for a lot of words.”

“This is why I like working behind a bar,” said the bartender. “You learn shit every day.”

“Do you know where this place is?” I asked him, spinning the napkin around so he could read the address.

He frowned at it for a few moments.

“Vedders Pond, right?” he asked the poetry expert sitting next to me. He studied the napkin.

“Yeah, not even a mile from here. Little shit-ass freshwater pond with a half a dozen places, give or take. Can’t build more’n that on the wetlands.”

I knew where he meant. I jogged through that area back when I was motivated to jog more than a few miles from my house. The last time I’d passed through I noticed how the original shacks had been upgraded to suit their new status as waterfront property. Robin and Laura were right to say it
was a bargain. Waterfront was liquid gold in the Hamptons. They once proposed an inflated price for a house in the shadow of the Village water tower. When the buyer balked they pointed skyward and said, “Hey, check it out. Water view.”